04/29/2026
A little more history from Paris.
During the French Revolution, the government stripped Notre-Dame of its bells. Between May 1791 and August 1792, nineteen of them were lowered from the towers, broken apart, and melted down. The metal went into cannons and coins.
One was left behind. Emmanuel, the great bourdon (the massive low-pitched bell) in the south tower, was simply too heavy to move. At 13 tons (28,660 pounds), removing it would have required an effort the revolutionaries didn't bother with. So it stayed.
It had been hanging there since 1685, named by its godfather Louis XIV.
The revolutionaries did use it once. In 1793, they rang Emmanuel for the Festival of Reason, a ceremony held inside Notre-Dame after the cathedral had been stripped of its religious function and briefly converted into a temple of philosophy. Then they took it down and put it in storage. Napoleon had it rehung in 1802.
When Napoleon III replaced the nineteen lost bells in 1856, he used metal from Russian cannons captured during the Crimean War. Bells melted into cannons, then cannons melted back into bells.
Those 1856 replacements were cast with inferior metal and rang out of tune for 150 years. They were finally replaced in 2013 when Notre-Dame celebrated its 850th anniversary. Emmanuel, still in the south tower, was kept. It is the only bell in the cathedral that predates the Revolution.
It rang for the Liberation of Paris in 1944. It rang for the funeral of Jacques Chirac in 2019. It rang again when Notre-Dame reopened on December 8, 2024.
